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It is the dream of every worker: taking vacation time as much as you want in the short term and not worry about your boss calling you on it. Leave early, take a long weekend, string two weeks - as you like. No need to call in sick on Friday so you can disappear for a fishing trip. Just go, no one is watching.

Vacation With IBM

That is essentially what goes on at IBM, one of the cornerstones of corporate America, where each of the 355 000 workers are entitled to three or more weeks of vacation. The company does not keep track of who takes how long, or when not to distribute the choice vacation periods by seniority and not let people carry days off each year. Instead, for the past year, employees at all levels have made informal arrangements with their direct supervisors, guided mainly by their ability to do your work on time. Many people post their vacation plans on electronic calendars that colleagues can view online, and they leave word about how they can be reached in a pinch.

"It's like when you went to college and you did not have high school teachers nagging you anymore," said Mark L. Hanny, IBM's vice president of alliances with independent software vendors. "Employees like that we put more responsibility on them."

But the flip side of flexibility, at least at IBM, is peer pressure. Mr. Hanny and other IBM employees, including his assistant, Shari Chiara, say they frequently check their e-mails and voice mail during the holidays. Bosses sometimes ask subordinates to cancel days off to meet deadlines.

Some labor experts say such continued blurring of lines between work and play can overtax employees and lead to health problems, especially in companies where there is an expectation that everyone is always on duty.

﻿Vacation in IBM jOB

"If the leadership does not take the time, people will be skeptical whether they can," said Kim Stattner of Hewitt Associates, a human resources consultancy. "There is the possibility of a domino effect."

Frances Schneider, who retired from an IBM sales division last year after 34 years, said one thing never changed, there was a year when she took all her allotted time off.

"It was seven days a week, but people ended up putting in more hours because of all the flexibility, without really thinking about it," says Schneider. "Although you had this wonderful freedom to take days when you want, you really could not. IBM tends to be a group of workaholics."

IBM officials said they have no idea whether workers take more days or less now than before, and have not studied the effects of policy on efficiency.

But they point to employee surveys showing that self-directed work and vacation policy is one of the top three reasons workers choose to stay there.

"Change is change," said Richard Calo, vice president of relations of the global workforce. "We had some initial questioning. But at the end of the day, you remember how much time you spend. This was not a difficult task."

Mr. Calo, the human resources supervisor, said the vacation policy for an indefinite period "is not a total license to do whatever you want to do," and that employees are expected to produce quality work, even though the company did not paying attention to when or where they work.

The hands-off approach to vacation time, which gradually took over the past decade, came amid change IBM's engineering and manufacturing into services like consulting and is part of a broader demise of old notions of eight pay hours to eight hours of work "in a fixed location.

Aided by broadband connections, cellphones and video conferencing software, 40 percent of IBM's employees have no dedicated offices, working instead at home, at a customer site, or a company of hundreds of "centers of electron mobility "throughout the world, where workers drop in to use phones, Internet connections and other resources.

Long a trendsetter in human resources - it began offering family leave in the 1950s - IBM is probably the largest end so completely with tracking vacation, although a number of new and small firms have similar policies.

Best Buy has introduced a program called results-oriented Work Environment for its 4,000 company employees, giving them freedom to do their job without regard to the hours they put in day.

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